12 Films of Christmas - Numbers 9 to 7
The countdown to best 2024 film (viewed at Christmas) continues!
9. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl – inventors inventing (yet more stuff his poor dog has to sort out)
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Almost twenty years after the first Wallace & Gromit feature film, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, and sixteen years after the most recent short, A Matter of Loaf and Death, the dynamic duo are back, with word having gone around that one of the most dastardly villains of our time would be returning to the big screen. Indeed, the fowl in question is none other than Feathers McGraw, the glassy-eyed penguin who manipulated Wallace back in 1993 (The Wrong Trousers) to steal a diamond from the city museum, wearing nothing but a pair of robotic slacks. Note 1993, and hence the main issue of Wallace and Gromit’s latest escapade – it’s been over thirty years, and Wallace just doesn’t learn. Of course, this is the point – the entire show relies on him gullibly allowing a sinister visitor into his (shared!) home (quite honestly, he is the worse roommate of all time), or inventing some seriously sketchy tech that backfires, but for the first time, it is, rather unfortunately, extremely irritating to watch. Wallace is now unlikeable, and worse, his once exciting contraptions (who wouldn’t want a mind manipulator or something that jams your bread up?) are now a testimony to his apparent inability to do anything himself. Gromit doesn’t even seem surprised anymore. He doesn’t even try to convince Wallace something has gone wrong – he just deals with it resignedly. It’s quite sad, really. Anyone with an ounce of respect would have moved out long ago.
Formulaic storyline aside, every Wallace and Gromit has included a fresh friendly face and villain – in A Close Shave, Shaun (with his fair share of spin-offs), Wendolene, and Preston, her sinister dog; in Were-Rabbit, Tottie and Victor Quartermaine, a bounder on a mission to exterminate Wallace; and in A Matter of Loaf and Death, Fluffles and Piella Bakewell, the former pin-up girl for Bake-o-Lite out for her baker’s dozen (or, in other words, exterminate Wallace). While reintroducing Feathers McGraw, no doubt in response to popular demand, was an excellent choice, Vengeance Most Fowl lacked strength in its friendly face, Norbot, the gnome Wallace invents to help Gromit in the garden. Reprogrammed as a henchman of sorts by McGraw, he has for this reason, unlike his predecessors, neither the charisma nor the gentility required to represent ‘the good’ (you can reprogram him all you want, his eyes are still creepy – and he is voiced by Reece Shearsmith, which says it all). It also meant we didn’t get as much evil penguin as we could have, seeing as most of his devilry was by Norbot-proxy. I’ve also always liked how cheese somehow contributes to a villain’s downfall. But not a wheel or Wensleydale in sight in this one.
8. My Old Ass – teenagers teenageing
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Here is a sweet, funny and light-hearted (or heavy-hearted, depending on what mood you are in) time-travel dramedy, perfect for rainy Sunday afternoons – or if one is in need of a long hard look at one’s self. Maisy Stella is Elliott, a teenager living on her parents’ cranberry farm in Ontario and a mere three weeks away from moving to Toronto to ‘start her life’. In the meantime, she’s spending her summer having sex with her middle school crush Chelsea, expressing disappointment at the state of her two younger brothers, and taking shroom tea with her best friends. It is on one of these trips that Elliott runs into ‘her old ass’, or her thirty nine year old self, played with habitual stoicism by Aubrey Plaza. After confirming that they are indeed the same person (because they have one breast larger than the other), Elliott ticks all the boxes expected from an eighteen year old meeting her older self, including asking for the lottery numbers through to whether she has a wife with three children. Her old ass is less than happy to assist, recounting minute details from the future with just a hint of boredom – “I don’t know how this works,” she says in response to the lottery request, which is a fresh enough point of view on time travel (see Biff’s passion with the Almanac in Back to the Future Part II).
My Old Ass is really more so about living in the moment, as future Elliott instructs present Elliott to do – by spending time with her strange and estranged brothers, one who has an unexplained obsession with Saoirse Ronan, the other who plays golf alone, and with her mother, a kind and understated performance from Maria Dizzia. Unfortunately, we don’t actually learn all that much about them, which surely should be the opposite outcome of Elliott’s mission to pay more attention? It’s not quite Ladybird level. But, most importantly, My Old Ass is about staying away from boys named Chad – which, naturally, is the exact opposite of what Elliott does, when a Chad (Percy Hynes White) walks into her life on a summer internship with her father to ‘reconnect with his roots’, and forces her to question her sexuality.
The twist is semi-obvious (though still very effective, as I bawled my eyes out for poor, apparently middle-aged, Aubrey Plaza), and the story is somewhat simplistic, culminating in a clichéd ‘learning life lessons from each other’ voice note. Selfishly, I would have wanted more of Aubrey, with her debonair attitude and bored eyes, but considering she was supposed to be semi-supernatural, she brought just the right touch of mysticism in her absence. But in the end, I wonder – time travel aside – how realistic this film really is. Perhaps this is just the city girl in me talking, but who wouldn’t want to live on a cranberry farm with a lake and a private boat at hand?
7. La Palma – scientists sciencing
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Not a film, I know.
To be completely fair to La Palma’s credits, its opening remark that the island off the coast of Spain is “a ticking time bomb” has been stuck in my head since the first episode. Immediately upon finishing, I rushed to my trusty steed (laptop) to check whether La Palma was a thing – as in, whether there is actually a tsunami hazard. Which there is. The 2021 Cumbre Vieja volcanic eruption resulted in 843 million euros’ worth of damage, but hypotheses emitted in 2000 suggested that the western flank of the ridge could in future slide into the ocean and generate a giant wave, or “megatsunami”. This, told in four riveting episodes, is the premise of La Palma, a limited series about a Norwegian family caught in one of the biggest hypothetical natural disasters of all time. It builds tension brilliantly from the very first scene, in which a boat’s glass bottom cracks and all aboard mysteriously die. A gas emission in the mountain follows, which leaves scientists Marie (Thea Sofie Loch Næss) and Haukur (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) in a bad way after noticing the instability of the western flank.
It’s quite late down the line by the time the tsunami actually makes its grand entrance (with stunning special effects), but by this time, there has been ample and precious time to warm to the characters, from Marie and her colleagues through to the family of four at the crux of the drama, married couple Fredrik (Anders Baasmo Christiansen) and Jennifer (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal) and children Tobias and Sara (whose father is slightly unclear throughout). While Tobias could have done with a bit more fleshing out (his sole character trait seems to be “on the spectrum”), Sara embarks on an entire storyline of her own, including discovering she is most likely a lesbian after meeting a girl on the beach and booking a flight to Madrid when her parents’ fighting gets a bit too much. Some of it is a bit ridiculous – don’t let your daughter leave the only safe space to go find a girl she’s known two days, please – while other familial tensions are so authentically portrayed the tsunami almost feels like a third wheel. La Palma only truly falls flat in its choice of ending – where its commentary on the genuinely frightening and tragic nature of this catastrophe could have landed as well as its opening episodes, La Palma instead goes for a purely Americanised survival film finale, in which some characters’ survival is genuinely laughable (you have to see it to believe it), and others’ is pointless. I might even go as far as saying that it’s quite mean, without any reasoning behind it. All it really needed to finish it off was a Norwegian flag, patriotically flying above the survivors.